Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to techniques for configuring and managing wireless connections between portable electronic devices.
Related Art
Wi-Fi® radio interfaces allow mobile devices to participate in various types of Wi-Fi networks, which include traditional infrastructure networks and Wi-Fi peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The ability to form network connections without a physical cord provides a great advantage to these mobile devices because such devices tend to move from one location to another, all the while forming intermittent connections with other devices that happen to be within range.
However, mobile device users that happen to form a Wi-Fi P2P network have no physical way of stopping an unwanted device from attempting to connect to or eavesdrop on the network. To remedy this vulnerability, Wi-Fi networks may implement security protocols to (1) authenticate new devices, and (2) encrypt data transmissions sent within the network. The device that forms the Wi-Fi network (e.g. a Wi-Fi access point) generally dictates the security configuration of the network, thereby compelling all other network members to use the same security configuration. Applications executing on these devices are also bound to the same security configuration. This arrangement can cause problems when the security configuration is incompatible with an application's security requirements. For example, a user would not want to execute an application that transmits sensitive data to networked recipients in a Wi-Fi network that does not enable data encryption.
Thus, a method for enabling an application to configure the security configuration of a Wi-Fi connection is needed.